Thoughts on Life, Love, Politics, Hypocrisy and Coming Out in Mid-Life

Monday, April 17, 2017

Conservatism's and Today's GOP's Ugly History

As noted in a post over the weekend, Donald Trump may not have created the ugliness that now is the mainstream of today's Republican Party and conservatism in general, but he surely has tapped into aspects of America's history that represent the worse parts of human nature and society. Worse yet, he has driven many in the Republican Party who once stood against what I view as a growing embrace of ignorance and extremism away from the party. So-call Rockefeller Republicans now count themselves as independents, if not Democrats, and the GOP has become a veritable coven of know nothings, religious extremists and white supremacists behind a thin veneer that purports to want small government and lower taxes. A lengthy column in the New York Times that I bookmarked last week looks at some of this history and the ugly forces now in control of the Republican Party. Here are excerpts:

Until Nov. 8, 2016, historians of American politics shared a rough
consensus about the rise of modern American conservatism. It told a respectable
tale. By the end of World War II, the story goes, conservatives had become a
scattered and obscure remnant, vanquished by the New Deal and the apparent
reality that, as the critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950, liberalism was “not
only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”

Year Zero was 1955, when
William F. Buckley Jr. started National Review, the small-circulation magazine
whose aim, Buckley explained, was to “articulate a position on world affairs
which a conservative candidate can adhere to without fear of intellectual
embarrassment or political surrealism.”Buckley excommunicated the John Birch
Society, anti-Semites and supporters of the hyperindividualist Ayn Rand, and
his cohort fused the diverse schools of conservative thinking — traditionalist
philosophers, militant anti-Communists, libertarian economists — into a
coherent ideology, one that eventually came to dominate American politics.

I
was one of the historians who helped forge this narrative. . . . Goldwater’s
loss, far from dooming the American right, inspired a new generation of
conservative activists to redouble their efforts, paving the way for the Reagan
revolution. Educated whites in the prosperous metropolises of the New South
sublimated the frenetic, violent anxieties that once marked race relations in
their region into more palatable policy concerns about “stable housing values”
and “quality local education,” backfooting liberals and transforming
conservatives into mainstream champions of a set of positions with enormous
appeal to the white American middle class.

Then
the nation’s pre-eminent birther ran for president. Trump’s campaign was
surreal and an intellectual embarrassment, and political experts of all stripes
told us he could never become president. That wasn’t how the story was supposed
to end. National Review devoted an issue to writing Trump out of the
conservative movement; an editor there, Jonah Goldberg, even became a leader of
the “Never Trump” crusade. But Trump won — and some conservative intellectuals
embraced a man who exploited the same brutish energies that Buckley had
supposedly banished.

The
professional guardians of America’s past, in short, had made a mistake. We
advanced a narrative of the American right that was far too constricted to
anticipate the rise of a man like Trump. . . . . Which poses a question: If
Donald Trump is the latest chapter of conservatism’s story, might historians
have been telling that story wrong?

In
the 1994 issue of The American Historical Review that featured Alan Brinkley’s
“The Problem of American Conservatism,” Ribuffo wrote a response contesting
Brinkley’s contention, now commonplace, that Trilling was right about American
conservatism’s shallow roots. Ribuffo argued that America’s anti-liberal
traditions were far more deeply rooted in the past, and far angrier, than most
historians would acknowledge, citing a long list of examples from “regional
suspicions of various metropolitan centers and the snobs who lived there” to
“white racism institutionalized in slavery and segregation.”

[W]e
can now see a history that is indeed unsettling — but also unsettlingly
familiar. Consider, for example, an essay published in 1926 by Hiram Evans, the
imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, in the exceedingly mainstream North
American Review. His subject was the decline of “Americanism.” Evans claimed to
speak for an abused white majority, “the so-called Nordic race,” which, “with
all its faults, has given the world almost the whole of modern civilization.”
Evans, a former dentist, proposed that his was “a movement of plain people,”
and acknowledged that this “lays us open to the charge of being hicks and
‘rubes’ and ‘drivers of secondhand Fords.’ ” But over the course of the last
generation, he wrote, these good people “have found themselves increasingly uncomfortable,
and finally deeply distressed,” watching a “moral breakdown” that was
destroying a once-great nation.

This
“Second Klan” (the first was formed during Reconstruction) scrambles our
pre-Trump sense of what right-wing ideology does and does not comprise. (Its
doctrines, for example, included support for public education, to weaken
Catholic parochial schools.) The Klan also put the predations of the
international banking class at the center of its rhetoric. Its worldview
resembles, in fact, the right-wing politics of contemporary Europe — a
tradition, heretofore judged foreign to American politics, called “herrenvolk
republicanism,” that reserved social democracy solely for the white majority.
By reaching back to the reactionary traditions of the 1920s, we might better
understand the alliance between the “alt-right” figures that emerged as fervent
Trump supporters during last year’s election and the ascendant far-right
nativist political parties in Europe.

The general belief among historians, however, was that the Klan’s
national influence faded in the years after 1925, when Indiana’s grand dragon,
D.C. Stephenson, who served as the de facto political boss for the entire
state, was convicted of murdering a young woman.

But the Klan remained
relevant far beyond the South. In 1936 a group called the Black Legion, active
in the industrial Midwest, burst into public consciousness after members
assassinated a Works Progress Administration official in Detroit. The group,
which considered itself a Klan enforcement arm, dominated the news that year.
The F.B.I. estimated its membership at 135,000, including a large number of
public officials, possibly including Detroit’s police chief. The Associated
Press reported in 1936 that the group was suspected of assassinating as many as
50 people.

Stephen
H. Norwood, one of the few historians who did study the Black Legion, also
mined another rich seam of neglected history in which far-right vigilantism and
outright fascism routinely infiltrated the mainstream of American life. The
story begins with Father Charles Coughlin, the Detroit-based “radio priest” who
at his peak reached as many as 30 million weekly listeners. In 1938, Coughlin’s
magazine, Social Justice, began reprinting “Protocols of the Learned Elders of
Zion,” a forged tract about a global Jewish conspiracy first popularized in the
United States by Henry Ford. After presenting this fictitious threat,
Coughlin’s paper called for action, in the form of a “crusade against the
anti-Christian forces of the red revolution” — a call that was answered, in New
York and Boston, by a new organization, the Christian Front. Its members were
among the most enthusiastic participants in a 1939 pro-Hitler rally that packed
Madison Square Garden, where the leader of the German-American Bund spoke in
front of an enormous portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas. . . .
. Young Irish-Catholic men inspired by the Christian Front desecrated nearly
every synagogue in Washington Heights. The New York Catholic hierarchy, the
mayor of Boston and the governor of Massachusetts largely looked the other way.

Anti-Semitism
in America declined after World War II. But as Leo Ribuffo points out, the
underlying narrative — of a diabolical transnational cabal of aliens plotting
to undermine the very foundations of Christian civilization — survived in the
anti-Communist diatribes of Joseph McCarthy. The alien narrative continues
today in the work of National Review writers like Andrew McCarthy (“How Obama Embraces
Islam’s Sharia Agenda”) and Lisa Schiffren (who argued that Obama’s parents
could be secret Communists because “for a white woman to marry a black man in
1958, or ’60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist
politics”). And it found its most potent expression in Donald Trump’s stubborn
insistence that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Trump’s
connection to this
alternate right-wing genealogy is not just rhetorical. In 1927, 1,000 hooded
Klansmen fought police in Queens in what The Times reported as a “free for
all.” One of those arrested at the scene was the president’s father, Fred
Trump. (Trump’s role in the melee is unclear; the charge — “refusing to
disperse” — was later dropped.) In the 1950s, Woody Guthrie, at the time a
resident of the Beach Haven housing complex the elder Trump built near Coney
Island, wrote
a song about “Old Man Trump” and the “Racial hate/He stirred up/In the
bloodpot of human hearts/When he drawed/That color line” in one of his housing
developments. In 1973, when Donald Trump was working at Fred’s side, both
father and son were named in a
federal housing-discrimination suit.

The
1960s and ’70s New York in which Donald Trump came of age, as much as
Klan-ridden Indiana in the 1920s or Barry Goldwater’s Arizona in the 1950s, was
at conservatism’s cutting edge, setting the emotional tone for a politics of
rage.

In 1965, Congress once more allowed large-scale immigration to the
United States — and it is no accident that this date coincides with the
increasing conservative backlash against liberalism itself, now that its spoils
would be more widely distributed among nonwhites.

The liberalization of
immigration law is an obsession of the alt-right. Trump has echoed their rage.
“We’ve admitted 59 million immigrants to the United States between 1965 and
2015,” he noted last summer, with rare specificity.

A puzzle remains.If Donald Trump was elected as a
Marine Le Pen-style — or Hiram Evans-style — herrenvolk republican,
what are we to make of the fact that he placed so many bankers and billionaires
in his cabinet, and has relentlessly pursued so many 1-percent-friendly
policies? More to the point, what are we to the make of the fact that his
supporters don’t seem to mind?

Here, however, Trump is far
from unique. The history of bait-and-switch between conservative electioneering
and conservative governance is another rich seam that calls out for fresh
scholarly excavation: not of how conservative voters see their leaders, but of
the neglected history of how conservative leaders see their voters.

It is a short leap from advertising and reality TV to darker forms of
manipulation. Consider the parallels since the 1970s between conservative
activism and the traditional techniques of con men. . . . . The dubious
grifting of Donald Trump, in short, is a part of the structure of conservative
history.

Future
historians won’t find all that much of a foundation for Trumpism in the grim
essays of William F. Buckley, the scrupulous constitutionalist principles of
Barry Goldwater or the bright-eyed optimism of Ronald Reagan. They’ll need
instead to study conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual
embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage. It will not be a
pleasant story. But if those historians are to construct new arguments to make
sense of Trump, the first step may be to risk being impolite.

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Out gay attorney in a committed relationship; formerly married and father of three wonderful children; sometime activist and political/news junkie; survived coming out in mid-life and hope to share my experiences and reflections with others.
In the career/professional realm, I am affiliated with Caplan & Associates PC where I practice in the areas of real estate, estate planning (Wills, Trusts, Advanced Medical Directives, Financial Powers of Attorney, Durable Medical Powers of Attorney); business law and commercial transactions; formation of corporations and limited liability companies and legal services to the gay, lesbian and transgender community, including birth certificate amendment.

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